Office Delayed, Too 463
turnitover writes "And you thought calling it 'Office 2007' was just to make it seem all future-like -- but according to eWEEK.com's Mary Jo Foley, turns out calling it is truth in advertising: Office 2007 won't ship until 2007. What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?"
Wait a sec! (Score:5, Informative)
Not until there is reported improvement in load times. For God's sake, how can one be expected to wait for 47 seconds for OpenOffice.orgs's writer to load a 1.7Mb document with 23 pages and 6 images? It's insane! I will not say what the other application takes but I'm sure every slashdotter knows what I am talking about.
Re:Wait a sec! (Score:4, Informative)
My OO.o2 loads a 10MB document with lots of images (~20) and 10 embedded tables, in under 10 seconds.
Have you ever tried the version 2.0.2 of OpenOffice.org?
Seems to me that you haven't
Not a fan of KDE but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait a sec! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Failures (Score:5, Informative)
Who cares? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org? (Score:5, Informative)
Delay bad news for MS? (Score:3, Informative)
vaporware
When it finally arrives, the faithful will take to it like flies to shit while others like myself will simply ignore it. Many big corporations will take years to warm up to it, even though Dell will soon be selling Vista and an Office 2007 license with almost every other PC that people buy from them.
Re:Collaboration (Score:3, Informative)
Re:At our office (Score:5, Informative)
The total number of available columns in Excel
Old Limit: 256 (2^8)
New Limit: 16k (2^14)
The total number of available rows in Excel
Old Limit: 64k (2^16)
New Limit: 1M (2^20)
Number of levels of sorting on a range or table
Old Limit: 3
New Limit: 64
The maximum length of formulas (in characters)
Old Limit: 1k characters
New Limit: 8k characters
The number of levels of nesting that Excel allows in formulas
Old Limit: 7
New Limit: 64
Number of rows allowed in a Pivot Table
Old Limit: 64k
New Limit: 1M
Number of columns allowed in a Pivot Table
Old Limit: 255
New Limit: 16k
Not a bad thing, surely? (Score:2, Informative)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it; Office 2003 is good software and works well, so I'd rather wait until the upgrade is really worth it.
2000 - 2003 Migration Creating Problems (Score:2, Informative)
Furthermore, while it looks different, I haven't even noticed anything really novel about the new version.
Why stop there? (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, that's a better choice for many organizations. And there is seldom any need to upgrade everyone at once (too much red tape in my company to do that).
Alternatives to SA:
* You can buy Office via OEM licenses when you buy computers, and buy the new versions only when the machine goes obsolete.
* For years, we looked for volume discounts, only to be dissapointed with MS reluctance to give us a price break. For us, it turned out the best way to put Office on a computer was buy MS Works (with no intention of using it) and then buy an Office "upgrade" to upgrade Works. For whatever reason, MS offers the best pricing to customers who look like individual home users. So we did what individual home users do (several hundred times). Large/volume customers seldom get a deal as good as quantity 1 retail.
Re:At our office (Score:3, Informative)
That's not hard to change, reminds me of bad stuff (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone who would want such a huge spreadsheet needs help. Typically, the problem is improper organization or lack of more appropriate tool. Better tools would be databases or batch processing of data streams. Help them early because the problem only gets worse with "advances" like this.
I've seen worse abuse of spreadsheets. The most God awful sheet I ever saw had tons of macros. They each got data from different sources, one still used a modem to call a local high school's weather station, and the results of each had to be "checked" by hand. That spreadsheet was part of the process used to set the local price of electricity. It had grown, like a cancer, for years. This is what happens without proper IT support. Far from being enabled and helped, the victim was lead down a path of inappropriate tools to a giant cluster.
Had the company used free software, they might not have had to fire their programmers. Someone convinced them that "computer programming was not a core business." That's true, but neither is accounting and the "off the shelf" solution they were sold instead will cost them many times more than their own staff. For all their money they could have had things that work right.